Recommended Reading

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a book signing by Richard Belzer at the National Press Club. You may know Belzer better as Detective John Munch of TV’s popular crime show “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”
Belzer is also a writer. His new book, “Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination” co-authored with David Wayne, describes the many witnesses with some knowledge of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy who have died under shadowy circumstances.In person, Belzer is a soft-spoken, polite guy who wore a grey suit and tennis shoes and brought his little white dog Baby along to the signing, which drew a packed house.
The press club event was co-hosted by Washington resident Dick Gregory, a famed comedian and early skeptic of President Lyndon Johnson’s Warren Commission, which concluded President Kennedy was killed by a “lone gunman” on that sunny morning of November 22, 1963 in Dallas.
Gregory was not alone in doubting the Warren Commission. And Hit List is not the first book to raise questions about the assassination.
I have been seriously interested in the subject for years, since reading Conspiracy, written by British journalist Anthony Summers and used as a source by Belzer in Hit List. Another book on the subject that fuelled my curiosity was High Treason by Robert Groden. Back in the late 1980s, when I landed a daily radio talk show at WFIR am 96 in Roanoke, Virginia, I dedicated my first broadcast to that book. We got lots of calls and I began regular interviews of authors, witnesses, and public officials–including the late Jim Garrison, District Attorney of New Orleans, the Dallas deputy sheriff in the white hat and suit who was handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald was shot. I became so obsessed with the JFK assassination that my second wife and I visited the Book Depository in Dallas on our honeymoon to see the infamous “6th floor” window from which Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot JFK; the building is now a museum dedicated to JFK’s memory. (Maybe my devotion to solving the murder mysteries of JFK is why our marriage didn’t last too long?!?)
Belzer and Wayne also collaborated on another book, Dead Wrong, which argues that Marilyn Monroe was murdered and that the person who shot Martin Luther King Jr. was acting on government orders. Hit List and Dead Wrong are must reads for those with an interest history, politics, murder mysteries, or celebrity gossip.